Just In: President Buhari endorses N30,000 new minimum wage

According to Sahara Reporters, the president gave his endorsement on Tuesday, November 6 shortly after he received the report of the committee presented to him.

The president promised to forward the new minimum wage bill to the National Assembly for action. He also urged Nigerian workers not to allow themselves be used as political weapons. Recall that the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) suspended its planned strike action following an agreement reached with the federal government. The Cable reports that Ayuba Wabba who is the president of the NLC spoke after the tripartite committee meeting held on Monday, November 6.

It was reported that after the long hours of meeting, an agreement was reached followed by signing of documents. Wabba said: “Having reached this position and agreements signed, the proposed strike action is hereby suspended.” Vanguard reports that Ama People who is the chairperson of the committee said the government has suggested N24,000 minimum wage but the NLC insisted on N30,000. She said: “We have concluded and we have a little challenge with what we call Chapter 5 of our report, that is where we have the numbers and the figures we used for the negotiations and the figures that we concluded with and the committee has two figures: the N24,000 suggested by the federal government and the N30,000 given by the organized labour.

“There is no stalemate. We have finished and we have signed it but we are insisting that the strike must be called off. There are still two figures, N24,000 and N30,000. You know that labour came up with a figure of N66,500 but when we put all that together with the figure we got from the states…so, we put all that in a basket plus the initial figure that the federal government recommended which was N20,700. We put them together in a basket and came up with four scenarios, we worked with one of the scenarios and that was how we agreed on that N24,000 and N30,000 respectively.”